The present invention relates generally to the area of information processing and, more particularly, to system and methods for managing delivery of time-sensitive, business-critical information to multiple individuals located at various locations.
The Internet is a new common carrier for information which has already signaled major transformations in virtually all segments of society, in virtually every corner of the globe. At this early and fervent stage of development, Internet usage is in widespread corporate trial and deployment. There can be little doubt that the Internet, including its internal corporate version (i.e., "Intranets"), will fundamentally transform the nature of corporate communication.
New carriers for information do not happen often, and have historically fundamentally altered basic business and social processes. A "common carrier" is a conduit for information that is not specific to a particular task or kind of information and can carry that information independent of ultimate purpose. It is insightful to explore how the telephone, the last common carrier, evolved.
At the outset of its deployment as a communication carrier, telephone "applications" required significant manual control and intervention and carried rather simple interpersonal voice communication. While the handset and basic instrumentation have changed little, the "back office" requirement of a manual switchboard and operator patch panel needed to bring the telephone into a community was a very significant investment and ongoing resource commitment. All call origination and completion were manual activities.
In fact, the telephone network took many decades to evolve as a common carrier for all types of information, involving more applications than the literal use of a telephone handset held to the ear. Over this period, the telephone evolved into a carrier for voice and data and has been used for embedded communication and coordination with a vast array of applications, such as fax machines, burglar alarm systems, voice mail, and the like. As the uses and types of information carried on the telephone evolved, the telephone realized its more complete purpose as a common carrier of information.
The Internet is in its early, literal phase. Today, most activity is focused on the carrier-level development and deployment--in effect, basic plumbing and tools. This is very similar to the first literal phase for the telephone, concentrating on developing and deploying the community switchboards and its first application for interactive voice. TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) lines, routers and firewalls are the equivalent of telephone wiring, while the Web Server and Mail Servers correspond to the telephone switchboard, with Web browsers and e-mail readers analogous to the first literal use of the telephone. As it matures, the Internet will begin to realize its full potential as a common carrier of information--carrying all kinds of data for different purposes, and for use within a variety of information-centric applications.
It is useful to review what the Internet actually constitutes. At its core, the Internet is an open standard for communicating and interconnecting packets of information represented digitally, regardless of the type or format of the information or originating source or destination. Every computing device on the Internet has a unique address, the IP (Internet Protocol) address, and can direct its flow of packets to a specific application or process at the destination (the port). The Internet too can server as a common carrier. It is platform independent, application independent, and format independent. Its strength lies in exactly this generality.
For fifteen years, the Internet was primarily used by academic researchers. Common applications employed with the Internet included: Electronic mail (SMTP application programs communicating with each other to exchange delivered mail); Client/Server terminal access to a remote application (Telnet); and File transfer between sites (FTP--File Transport Protocol). The majority of information flowing was textual information or proprietary data formats. Text was, in effect, the "lingua franca" of the Internet.
The World Wide Web has injected fundamental vibrancy and urgency to the Internet. In addition to adding multimedia richness, the World Wide Web breaks through the rather esoteric user interfaces formerly used by academics. The Web is a specific client and server Internet application that uses the capabilities of the Internet for cataloging, browsing, retrieving and displaying multimedia information. Specifically, it contributes a new application protocol--HTTP (HyerText Transport Protocol)--and a specific Web server application to use it, for information retrieval and processing. A new application, the "Web Browser," was introduced which understands how to interact using HTTP and how to interpret and richly display the content received via HTTP. A new "lingua franca" data format, HTML, arose--a format that is dramatically richer in layout and formatting capability than text. The Internet today overwhelmingly consists of Web servers, Web browsers, mail servers and mail reader applications tied together on the common carrier.
Virtually the only applications today that understand the HTTP protocol are Web servers and interactive Web browsers. There are few, if any, other types of applications that have built-in use of Internet and Web protocols other than the literal interactive application for which it was conceived. This is very similar to the early telephone usage described earlier where the telephone instrument is used solely by people for interactive voice communication. Control of the telephone common carrier for data communications and automated inter-application coordination and information flow came later.
The "Intranet," as popularly defined, is the usage of the Internet protocols, tools and applications within a corporate environment. The target purpose is as a common carrier of business-critical information for and between people and business systems. At a plumbing and tool level, the Intranet is essentially the same as the Internet. However, at an application level, the two differ substantially. Intranet applications, as they evolve, will be information-centric solutions to corporate business problems. Intranet application solutions will be different from general Internet solutions for the simple reason that corporate information needs are different from the needs of the general public.
Thus far, Internet applications and Intranet applications, as available from various Internet vendors, have not been distinguished. Applications have been underlying tools for customization and development by the corporate customer. The customer, or an outside consultant, must invest further to create Intranet applications for business critical needs.
Undoubtedly, the core elements of today's Internet applications and tools will survive, but the general Internet landscape of the future will barely resemble that of today. New applications will use common Internet protocols and formats but take the shape of business application solutions rather than that of the underlying technical platform. Web Servers, as known today, may disappear. Web browsers and e-mail readers will likely continue to evolve as universal clients, while new types of applications will build in Web-browser-like access within specialized application interfaces. The Internet and Intranet landscape in the future will consist of specialized business applications which are full participants on the Internet in providing information, participating in wide-area transactions, and seamlessly retrieving information from the Internet whenever needed for its processing.
The kind of specialized business application servers that will exist include, firstly, all or most of the current client/server business applications such as customer support systems, order entry systems, data warehousing and data mining, document management, configurators, inventory planners, sales lead tracking and opportunity management, and the like. All of these will be specialized application servers present and addressable on the Internet. All will make their data and transactions available from a Web browser. On the other hand, many new applications will be created that are either new specialized servers for outstanding business problems that cross departmental boundaries--applications that could not have easily been handled by previous dedicated client-server or groupware systems without massive coordination and changes in business structure and process. It is the common carrier status of the Internet and its ability to allow data and application communication to cross people, tasks, data formats, and vendor boundaries that empowers this change. This transformation of the nature of Internet applications will be equivalent of the telephone network reaching common carrier status.
It is useful to divide the types of information present within a corporate setting into "static information" and "dynamic information." Static information is information of general interest, that is, information that does not have a high time-value but is useful for general reference. Dynamic information, on the other hand, is information that has a high time value; here, changes or updates have immediate impact. In general, dynamic information is business-critical information for which communication on a timely basis can have business revenue and productivity impact. This is the information that runs the company and reflects the corporate response to changing events. Examples of this includes: Pricing updates or modifications that occur based on market pressure or competitive announcements; Emerging market or industry analyst reports that are competitive weapons for or against one's company and must be known by employees and partners in advance of the customers; Presentations of new products and update bulletins to be used by sales representatives and outside partners as a critical sales tool; and Reports and Flash Updates of sales forecasting and sell-through.
The Internet and the World Wide Web today are best suited for static information and as an archive for dynamic information. Business critical, dynamic information must be targeted to the right people for immediate impact. This is performed today, even in the most highly technologically advanced companies, by combinations of electronic interpersonal mail, fax blasters, Federal Express packages, and hastily dispatched voice mails. In most companies, all of the these methods are used in order to try to guarantee business critical information reaches the right parties at the right time. Unfortunately, such an approach is a significant burden which relies on mostly manual ad hoc practices to "get the word out." Specifically, the approach produces information overload for the recipients and causes the most critical information to be often overlooked. It is this business-critical target information flow that the Internet can provide a solution for. This is not addressed with present-day Internet tools and applications. What is needed are system and methods which provide for management and delivery of time-sensitive, business-critical information to multiple individuals located at various locations.